Only in the Novel

I have finished reading Philip Roth’s new novel, Everyman, and have filed the review I wrote for a newspaper, so my job is done, but Roth’s book, which is without conventional suspense because it opens with the funeral of the title character and closes with his death, will not leave me alone. There is nothing disturbing about this sensation; in fact, it’s reassuring, because the best fiction goes on nagging us, reproaching our weaker, less worthy selves, despite our best efforts to ignore it or even scratch the persistent moral itch it leaves behind. Novels like Everyman add another echo to what Cynthia Ozick wisely calls “the din in our head.”

That phrase is the title of an Ozick essay on the potential of the novel, and it lends its name to her latest collection of essays. She writes:

“What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel’s intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor – what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable – are what the novel knows.”

I love those “cobwebby knowings.” To cite James: In The Portrait of a Lady, the title’s darker meaning, like a photograph in a tank of developer, only gradually emerges. Gilbert Osmond is a collector of things. He is forever reminding us of his exquisite good taste (in art, in daughters, in wives). He aestheticizes life. As the scene of the novel shifts from England (which immediately reminds Isabel, an American, of a novel – she is susceptible to the lure of art) to Italy, we enter a world filled with paintings, sculptures, picturesque ruins, ceramics, opera and Mr. Rosier’s “bibelots.” Osmond’s is a decadent world in which even marriage is merely a “magnificent form” (his words).

For Osmond, Isabel is another bauble in his collection; not an autonomous human being but a “portrait of a lady.” Osmond creates for his wife a sort of Platonic nightmare, in which the merely real (human) can never live up to the cold rigors of the ideal (nonhuman). He wishes to hang her unchanging portrait in a mausoleum-like museum. Osmond is not a “portrait of the artist.” He is James’s cautionary portrait of a perverse, life-denying aesthete who corrupts the artistic impulse. In Chapter LI, we catch our only glimpse of Osmond actually doing something physical: He is copying the image of an antique coin, an act that more closely resembles counterfeiting than artistic creation.

James’ irony in bringing together Isabel and Osmond is harsh. Isabel starts out wanting nothing more than to be free. Her passion for unencumbered freedom is so fierce, she turns down attractive marriage proposals from Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood to preserve it. Isabel’s devotion to freedom is doomed because it is too theoretical. She gives little thought to the plans and plots of others and the impact they may have on her. She is ripe for the machinations of life’s Machiavellians – Osmond and Madame Merle.

What I remember most vividly from Portrait is Osmond copying that coin – in itself, a harmless act, but in James’ hands a chilling symptom of Osmond’s moral and aesthetic sterility. From Everyman, my most vivid memory is the title character teaching painting to fellow seniors in his New Jersey retirement community, and trying to comfort one of his students who has cancer and whose husband has recently died. He sits beside her on the bed and, for once, sex is not on his mind. Everyman is death-obsessed, and his gentleness and tact with Mrs. Kramer is touching and causes us, as readers, to reevaluate this severely flawed but hardly evil man. Never again will I think about death, a specific death or in the abstract, without thinking of Roth’s Everyman. He augments one's moral and imaginative inner landscape.

Ozick finishes her essay optimistically:

“The din in our heads, that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread – where, in an age of machines addressing crowds, and crowds mad for machines, can it be found? In the art of the novel; in the novel’s infinity of plasticity and elasticity; in a flap of imaginary wallpaper [a reference to passages quoted earlier from Turgenev and Woolf]. And nowhere else.”